1 Then the Lord’s word came to me: 2 And thou, son of man …[1] A message to the land of Israel from the Lord God! For this land, for every corner of it, here is doom, here is doom. 3 Doom for thee at last; I mean to wreak vengeance on thee, pass sentence on thy evil life, bring home to thee thy foul deeds. 4 Nor shall my eye melt with pity; I will not spare. All thy evil life brought home to thee, all thy foul deeds confronting thee; who shall doubt that it comes from the Lord? 5 The blow, the first blow has fallen, says the Lord God; 6 all is over now, all is over; the day dawns, and for thee doom comes with day. 7 Dwellers in the land, this is the end of you; your time is up, your day has come; a day when your mountains shall echo with tumult, not with harvest-home.[2] 8 Close at hand, now, I will rain down my vengeance upon you, give my anger full play, no crime unjudged, no weight of punishment unborne. 9 Never shall my eye melt with pity for thee; all thy evil life shall be accounted for, all thy foul deeds brought to light; and none shall doubt that I, the Lord, punish.

10 It has come, the day has come; the wheel full circle,[3] the branch in full bloom, pride bears its harvest. 11 Violence has grown up into a shoot of rebellion … and not by their means, not through clamouring multitude of theirs; rest they shall have none. 12 The time is up, the day of reckoning come; who buys now, of his purchase shall have no joy, who sells now, shall not feel his loss; the Lord’s vengeance will overtake the whole throng of citizens alike;[4] 13 alas! here is property alienated for ever, though buyer and seller count among the living yet. The vision is for the whole throng of citizens; there is no reversing it; never a man of that guilty race shall survive.[5]

14 Sound the trumpet there, rally all to arms! But none goes out to war; on the whole throng of citizens my vengeance has fallen; 15 sword without, pestilence and famine within; sword for the straggler, pestilence and famine for the besieged. 16 Fugitives there shall be that make good their flight, but these must take to the mountains, fluttered as the doves that haunt their ravines, sinners all; 17 hands that hang listless, knees weak as water. 18 See where men go clad in sackcloth, trembling in every limb, with downcast faces, and their heads shorn! 19 See where they cast their silver out of doors, their gold on to the dung-hill; how should precious metal speed them in this day of the Lord’s vengeance? Hunger it sates not, belly it fills not; and this, all the while, was the very occasion of their guilt! 20 Did they not pride themselves on the beauty of their workmanship, was it not from this they made images of their detestable false gods? And now there it lies, all defilement! 21 Now I am giving it over to strangers for spoil; the vilest of earth’s inhabitants shall plunder it. 22 Still my eyes shall be averted, while my own treasure-chamber is broken open, while the enemy’s pursuivants enter and profane it. 23 Make short work of it,[6] a land where innocent lives are forfeit, a nest of wrong! 24 The very refuse of the heathen I will summon to dispossess them of their homes, to be masters of their holy places, that proud boast of theirs[7] now for ever silenced.

25 Days of despair, when they will look about them for a respite, and respite shall be none! 26 Fresh anxieties still, and fresh alarms; vainly they ask the prophet for revelation; tradition among the priests, counsel among the elders is none. 27 Mourns king, princes go covered with dismay, numb with despair the common folk; ill they shall fare, that ill did, cruelly be judged, that were cruel judges; they shall know what manner of God they serve.

[1] It seems probable that there is some slight omission in the manuscripts here.

[2] v. 7. ‘This is the end of you’; literally, in the Latin version, ‘ruin has come upon you’, but this is probably a guess, the word translated ‘ruin’ being of quite uncertain significance. The root idea seems to be that of ‘a garland’. ‘When your mountains shall echo with tumult, not with harvest-home’; literally, ‘of slaying (in the Hebrew, of tumult) and not of the glory (in the Hebrew, of the shout) of the mountains’.

[3] ‘The wheel full circle’ is only a guess at the sense of the Hebrew phrase ‘the garland (see note on verse 7) has gone out’. The text of this and the next two verses is hopelessly obscure, and may well be corrupt.

[5] The sense of the first clause is perhaps that property which changes hands now, in b.c. 587, will not revert to its owner at the time of jubilee (Lev. 25.13), because the population will still be in exile. Some think ‘the vision’ should be ‘the vengeance’; it is doubtful, in spite of Is. 55.11, whether ‘shall not return’ can mean ‘it is irreversible’. ‘Never a man of that guilty race shall survive’; literally, in the Latin, ‘a man shall not be strengthened in the wickedness of his life’, but a comparison of the Hebrew text with the Septuagint Greek suggests that the true meaning is ‘a man in his wickedness shall not lay hold of life’.

[6] Literally, ‘make a conclusion’; in the Hebrew text, ‘make a chain’.

[7] Literally, ‘the pride of the powerful’; this seems to be a phrase regularly applied to local sanctuaries (24.21, 30.18 below).